Storm's Missing: Lives Not Lost but Disconnected

By Shaila Dewan
The New York Times

Wednesday 01 March 2006

Baton Rouge, La. - As far as Curtis Broussard Jr. is concerned, he is not missing. He is in Missouri City, Tex., where he plans to stay. But according to the State of Louisiana, Mr. Broussard, formerly of Cherry Street, New Orleans, has not been found.

His daughter, Antonette Murray, had not heard from him since Hurricane Katrina. In January, she finally reported him to the state, expecting to hear back that he was dead. But though he was added to the missing list, other family members had known of his whereabouts since September, and a reporter recently put Mr. Broussard back in touch with his daughter after a few telephone calls.

Despite intensive efforts to reach the scattered refugees of Hurricane Katrina, nearly 2,000 such names remain on the state's list of people still unaccounted for, out of 12,000 that had once been reported. Even now, new missing persons reports trickle in; there were 99 over the two-week period that ended Feb. 5.

But officials say the number is less a measure of the storm's lethal power, or even of the lives it upended, than of the trauma, disarray and instability that persist half a year later. Only about 300 of those on the list are believed to have died in the flooding; many of the rest are adrift in America, having failed, for a variety of reasons, to remain in touch with their own families. A call center set up by the state to reunite families has struggled to get government financing and research tools.

Many of the recent reports of missing people are from distant relatives or friends looking for news. But others are more urgent: they come from mothers looking for their children's father; from families who have just found a relative's body in New Orleans and need to register that person officially, a requirement before a body can be released by the authorities; or from people who seem only now to be able to assume any task beyond day-to-day survival.

"We get some calls that say, 'I just thought about my fiancé is missing,' " said Lenora Green, shaking her head in a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. "It's like they just click back into reality because of the shock they're going through."

Ms. Green is a shift supervisor at the Find Family National Call Center, a vast array of cubicles, computers and telephones in a former sporting goods store in Baton Rouge, created after the hurricane to help people locate loved ones, living or dead. The call center is a collection place, not just of names and vital statistics, but of the most intimate stories of a poor city broken apart by crisis.

They include every permutation in the grand mosaic of human relationships, an intricate design of unpaid child support, paranoia, grudges, helplessness and anguish, the lonely cul-de-sacs of estrangement and old age.

"Some people are just getting out of jail," Ms. Green said. "Some, it's like baby-mama drama, I call it."

Some evacuees simply do not have access to the one human link most taken for granted: the telephone. Numbers have been changed, disconnected, rinsed away. "That's how I got lost," said Alvin Alphonse Jr., who was put on the missing list by a former girlfriend claiming to be his cousin. "I didn't have anybody written down, no numbers, nothing."

Scott Shepherd, another call center worker, allowed one couple to use the telephone at the center after they told him they did not have one.

After the call, he led the woman to a brass bell the workers ring every time someone is located.

"I was able to let that woman ring the bell for her own sister," Mr. Shepherd said.

Officials at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which helps reunite parents with their children, said they had had to adjust to some stark facts about a population that did not have access to phones, computers or in some cases even television. One reunion involved a child who had been left in the care of a neighbor who could not read or write.

But again, said Ernie Allen, president of the center, the problem is more fractured families than orphaned waifs. The most pressing cases, in which parents let their children have the first seats in rescue helicopters, or pushed them to the front of the line to board buses at the Superdome, have been resolved. The center has 131 children remaining on its list, down from more than 5,000.

"The vast majority of these kids are with a dad or a mother or a brother," Mr. Allen said. "They're not alone, but they're separated from some key person in their families."

Initially, families were told to contact the call center if they thought a loved one might have died in the storm. But some families have put off calling because they see it as an admission that they have lost hope. Still others have made a report but refused to fill out an eight-page "victim identification profile," which lists details like tattoos and jewelry. Without such a form, a body at the morgue might never be identified.

Cheryl Spooner, a call center worker who has used databases, the Internet and hunches to locate the missing, said one of her difficult cases was a mentally disabled man who had been in a group home in New Orleans. She cannot find the man, and she cannot find the home's owner. But the family does not want to fill out the profile or supply DNA for a match. "The brother is saying, 'We're going to keep searching for my brother. We don't want to do that right now,' " Ms. Spooner said.

She and other workers also regularly call back those who have reported someone missing, to see if they have made contact on their own.

Of the 12,000 reports taken by the call center, which is run by the state health department and staffed in part by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster mortuary team, more than 8,000 people have been found alive. But for the center's staff members, who might talk to a single caller a dozen times, it is the saddest stories that linger.

One woman waited months to report her daughter missing because she rarely heard from her anyway, and the place where her daughter stayed in the city had not flooded, said Bonnie Riley, a part-time minister who keeps her Bible close to the phone as she answers calls. But when the mother finally went back to New Orleans, she learned that her daughter had gone to the store after the storm. "And that's when the levees broke," Ms. Riley said, adding that the daughter was presumed to have drowned and been washed away.

Because many bodies may never be recovered, it may take years to learn how many of the 1,880 people on the missing list are dead, but the current estimate is around 300, which is based in part on the number of names about which there are repeated inquiries, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state emergency medical director. The total number of deaths so far in Louisiana is 1,080.

The call center has had its share of obstacles. Because of database incongruities, about a dozen people are listed as both missing and dead. It has no access to commercial databases that charge a fee to supply information about people, which is why a reporter with such access was able to put Mr. Broussard in touch with his daughter when the center had not. Because of privacy concerns, it has only recently been given access to FEMA's list of people who have applied for housing assistance, said Henry Yennie, the deputy director of operations at the center.

But for many, the center is the only hope, as other Internet sites for evacuees start to disappear. A spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, Kathleen Salanik, said its Web site, katrinasafe.com, was about to be taken down because it was no longer of use. "We know from previous disasters that the greatest need is in the first two to four weeks," Ms. Salanik said. But, she added, 11 people had posted or updated information on the site in the last 24 hours.

One of the center's tasks is to find the next of kin of the dead. That job falls to Christine Niss, a medical legal investigator who says it is as much art as science. "You have to sit and think about where they might leave a trace of themselves," Ms. Niss said, explaining how one victim's emphysema, revealed in an autopsy, had led her to his family.

She found a hospital in New Orleans where he had been a patient before the storm and had listed a next of kin.

In another case, her trail led her to several family members before she reached the victim's brother. "The whole family ended up getting back together and mending fences," Ms. Niss said. The brother was so grateful, she said, he called her right after the funeral. "There were still people in his house eating the deviled eggs."